The Israeli government announced today that it will no long allow international students to study medicine in Israel.
Tel Aviv University’s Sackler School of Medicine, Ben-Gurion Faculty of Health Sciences and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine will no longer consider intentional students for admission. Thousands of American and Canadian doctors are graduates of the 3 Israeli med schools.
The Israel Council for Higher Education made the decision to bar foreigners order to allow a larger number of Israeli students to attend medical school in Israel rather than being forced to attend international medical schools in Europe.
CHE will allow currently enrolled foreign students to finish their education at the 3 medical schools, but no new students can admitted starting immediately.
Israel is also suffering from a lack of physicians, and international students rarely stay after they graduate, while Israelis who go abroad will often not come back.
The majority of funding for Israeli universities comes from the government. So even though international students pay around 14X as much in tuition as Israelis, that is still barely petty cash compared to what the university is getting from taxpayers.
I mean, North Carolina has determined that UNC can only accept 18% of their students from OOS, and they only supply 30% of UNC’s budget. The Israeli government supplies more than 2/3 the budgets of the public universities. So they do have the ability, and the obligation, to make sure that their own students are being served, rather than non-citizens.
Unlike most of Europe, Israel does not have an inverted population pyramid, so enrollment in universities is still increasing. That means that it doesn’t need international students to boost enrollment.
I never understood why they were accepting int’l students for their relatively limited number of med school seats in the first place. These US and Canadian students were far, far more likely to wind up practicing in the US than in Israel, because doctors earn so much more in the US than in Israel or Canada. Israel has a shortage of physicians, so much so that it offers subsidies to US or Canadian MDs who are willing to move there to practice. Clearly, Israeli students are more likely to have family and other ties to Israel that increase the likelihood that they will remain in Israel to practice, rather than take their MD degree and move to practice outside of Israel.
The linked page hints that there may not have been so much of a physician shortage before in Israel.
Regarding the numbers, 300 spaces out of 1,200 seems to be quite large (25%) in the context of Israel, but small in the context of the US, where over 22,000 medical students matriculate each year (and not all of the 300 international students in Israel medical schools came from the US).
Tel Aviv’s Sackler School of Medicine was originally funded by American donors (the Sackler family of NY) back in days when Jews were discriminated against in med school admissions. Sackler was presented as an alternate route for American Jews to obtain a MD and then come back to practice in NY. NY state recognizes Sackler as school that meets all the standards for medical education in the state of NY and exempts Sackler grads from the restrictions placed on other IMGs.
I would expect - and this is not based on any facts - that a lot of the foreigners who chose to attend an Israeli medical school are eligible for citizenship (the right of return) even if they may not have it. This may be partially intended to entice them to obtain an Israeli passport.
However, many students of medical school age are also of typical military service age, so acquiring Israeli citizenship could require them to do military service that is mandatory for many Israeli citizens.
Most of the foreigners who chose to attend Israeli medical schools are American Jews who could not obtain admission to a US med school. Admission stats for Sackler, Ben-Gurion and Technion are only very slightly lower than admission stats for US MD programs.
Medical education classes are taught in English using the same curriculum that US MD programs use and offer specific preparation for USMLE exams. This is NOT true for most other foreign medical schools (except a few programs in the Caribbean that depend on US students to fill their classrooms). Sackler has longstanding agreements with a number of NYC hospitals to allow American students to do almost all of the required clinical rotations in the US. Clinical rotations are the final 2 years of med school. (And NY state statues specifically makes exceptions for Sackler students w/r/t limitations on the number of clinical rotations that IMGs are allowed to do in NY hospitals.)
Sackler’s program historically was not used to attract potential new Israeli citizens, but to provide an alternative educational pathway for Americans Jews to obtain a MD degree. It was always understood that US students would return to the US.
The closest analog to the Israeli med school programs would the the Oschner School of Medicine at University of Queensland in Australia. Oschner only accepts foreign students and does not really provide them with a pathway to enter postgraduate medical training (residency) in Australia. ) Oschner students are expected to return “home” at the end of med school–whether “home” is USA, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore or Qatar.
That is almost certainly a factor. This is especially attractive option for students since as Israeli citizens, they would only be paying $3,600 a year in tuition (as I wrote above, international students pay 14X that for medical school).
Unless they apply for, and receive, citizenship, before the age of 18, they will have a shortened service, and would have their service deferred until they finish medical school. For an American student, paying around $26,000 in tuition for their entire medical degree (since in Israel, it is a seven year degree which includes the undergraduate), instead of the $350,000 or so in tuition that this would cost in the USA, may be worth serving in the IDF as a medical officer for two years (as I wrote, it would likely be a shortened term), and almost certainly in some rear echelon clinic or medical center.
At Sackler, BGU and Technion, internationals can only enroll in the traditional 4 year med school program.
The 3 Israeli med schools all eligible for and participate in the [US] federal student loan program. Students who use fed loans to finance their medical education in Israel can use all the same repayment options that US physicians do, thus costs aren’t the foremost factor for US students when choosing to attend an Israeli med school.
On reddit, most of the students considering Sackler et. al. are not Jewish, but are student who didn’t get a US MD acceptance and are considering Sackler vs. a DO program. Sackler is still cheaper at full international price than many DO schools.
Yes, American med schools discriminated against Jews, as did Ivy league schools, all starting with Abbot Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard, who in the mid 1920’s, seeing that the sons of Eastern European Jewish immigrants were outscoring the sons of the WASP aristocracy on Harvard’s admission exam, instituted a restrictive Jewish quota to strictly limit the number of Jews at Harvard. Most of the other Ivy schools quickly followed suit. That quota effectively lasted until the 1960s, and Harvard has never apologized for it, let alone made any form of restitution for it.
HOWEVER, the Sackler med program was instituted in the mid-1970s, long after the days of discrimination against Jews in med school admissions. It had nothing to do with anti-semitism. It was more of a way of increasing med school seats for Jewish students who preferred to study in Israel, maybe had just barely missed the bar for the incredibly competitive process in the US. It did have a benefit of bringing doctors on board at US institutions who had been trained in Israel, who then were very comfortable accepting Israeli doctors for fellowship training in the US, since they knew from first-hand experience that the quality of med school training in Israel was excellent, at least the equivalent of US training.
Students who become Israeli citizens will also become eligible to enroll in the seven year program. Also, having “repayment options” for large loans is not the same as not having to take large loans.
On the other hand, if the students are not Jewish, than the option of becoming an Israeli citizen is generally not open to them.